Free Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) by Susannah Sandlin Page A

it sent a shiver through Krys, the memories of last night replaying—as if she could forget.
    Shaking aside the memory, she focused on the video. “My brother Owen or the members of his scathe are the ones who killed Doc,” Aidan was saying. “I don’t know how many of them there are. They can’t feed from you because you’re all bondedto one of us, but they’re still dangerous. We don’t want to start a full-scale war without knowing if Owen’s acting alone or if there’s someone more powerful backing him. In the meantime, we’re setting up security patrols and asking you to not go out alone at night.”
    Krys frowned, trying to make sense of it. What was a scathe? Feeding, bonding, precautions, war. And Aidan had told her the former doctor, if that’s who “Doc” was, died in a hunting accident. She felt like a tourist lost in a foreign country where everyone was chattering in a language she couldn’t understand.
    The town hall meeting, or at least that’s what Krys decided it was, lasted about an hour, then the screen went blank and it started over. Must be playing in a loop, making sure the good people of Penton were warned about...something. She watched it again, but the combination of poor sound quality and unfamiliar subject matter made it impossible to follow.
    She turned the volume down but left the set on while she did another futile round of beating on the door. Her throat ached from yelling, and her stomach rumbled from hunger. What the hell was she going to do?
    She noticed a brown bag sitting on the floor next to the coffee table and picked it up hesitantly. It didn’t tick or explode, so she opened it and found a box of vanilla wafers, a can of nuts, and a six-pack of bottled water. There was also a note, written on a plain square of paper in a small, looping script:
Someone will bring more food soon, and I will be there tonight to explain. I am sorry. —Aidan
    Yeah, he’d think
sorry
once she got her hands on him. Except the thought made her remember where her hands had already
been
on him. Good God in heaven.
    She took the nuts and a bottle of water and checked to make sure they hadn’t been opened. Who knew—poison wasn’t out of the question.
Tonight
, he’d written. Guess a kidnapped doctor wasn’t important enough to take up time during his busy workday.
    The nuts were too salty, but Krys forced down a handful while she flipped through the TV channels again. Was the reason Aidan couldn’t talk to her until tonight the same reason he couldn’t interview her during daylight hours? And some interview that had turned out to be.
    She crawled back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to construct an explanation that made sense. Sometime later, a sudden rattling woke her from a half doze, and she rolled off the bed so fast that she tripped and fell hard to her knees.
    A tray came sliding through the slot at the bottom of the door, and Krys scrambled toward it, yelling. It shut with a clang and the click of a lock, and no amount of pushing would budge it.
    “Help me!” Krys scrambled to her feet and pounded on the door. “I know you’re out there. Let me out of here, damn it! You can’t lock me up like this, Aidan Murphy!”
    Nothing. Not a sound.
    Her breath came in ragged bursts as she slid to the floor, but she gritted her teeth and swiped away the one stray tear that had escaped down her cheek. She was a survivor. Her first seventeen years had been spent with a father who used ridicule and belittlement, and occasionally his fists, as weapons of control. She’d escaped and made a life for herself, and no small-town psychopath was going to take it away. She was smarter than that. Smarter than he was. She had the bully-survival technique down. She just had to stay calm and let it play out.
    He was feeding her, so he wanted her for something and it had to be more than sex. Eventually he would show his hand.
    In the meantime she was frustrated as hell and screamed as loud as